We went to Petřín on Sunday and as we were walking down the steps toward the Castle, we passed by a sign informing visitors that the Large Garden Tunnel (one of the underground passages beneath Petřín) was having a special open day. I thought the English translation on the sign was priceless!
Here’s my discovery of the day: It is not Czech!
It really wasn’t making any sense to me. Whenever I’ve watched a Borat episode on HBO, I’ve wondered why Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakh character greets the viewers with the very Czech sounding Jagshemash. What does Kazakhstan have to do with the Czech Republic? Did Mr. Cohen decide to throw all those “Eastern Europeans” into one basket and make them all speak one language?
Today I discovered that the phrase is not meant to be Czech, but instead is supposed to be the Polish Jak się masz, which of course sounds very similar to Jak se máš. Ok then. So it isn’t Czech. Good. But why Polish??
There’s a Borat dictionary at Boyakasha.co.uk.
I read an article in the Prague Daily Monitor this week that was overflowing with the word server. There would be nothing wrong with that had the article been about servers, or at least one server. But the article wasn’t about servers. It was about a website. Here are a few excerpts from the text:
“Many mistakes on server promoting Czech Republic”
“The newly-launched internet server www.czech.cz, aimed to promote the Czech Republic…”
“The server is mainly designed for foreign tourists…”
I’d probably leave the article alone had it not become the proverbial last straw. For some reason, Czechs seem to have a particular liking for using the word server when referring to a website, so I read or hear about a server www this or www that or about someone “running a server about something” a lot more often than I’d like to. And now this article comes along…
To rtj/dr with the Prague Daily Monitor and to everyone who doesn’t know what a server is: A server (in Czech server) is a computer that sits in a room somewhere with a bunch of connectors and cables coming out of it. It’s a machine. It doesn’t promote anything, it can’t be launched unless it’s shot into space on a space shuttle, and it’s usually not designed for foreign tourists. The term you want to use is website (in Czech internetové/webové stránky), i.e. an online collection of pages with content.
Definitions of both terms can be found in dictionaries and encyclopedias all over the internet. Such as on that handy server called Wikipedia.
I came upon an interesting poll run by iDNES.cz in which readers are asked to choose their preferred one-word name of the Czech Republic. The options are: Czechia, Czechlands, Czech, Czecho. The current results can be seen here.
I don’t like any of the options and am not able to come up with a fifth one that would sound any better to me. I’m probably not the only one who feels that way. If I was, there would be no need to run this poll thirteen years after the Czech Republic came into existence. According to the article to which the poll is linked, the Czechs are being pressured by the United Nations to finally make up their minds and decide on a short name, for heaven’s sake.
I don’t know why the Slovaks are upset with us Czechs for having kept the flag after the split. Their country got out of the whole thing with a beautiful, perfectly fine name!
I grew up in a country where the Czech and Slovak languages intermingled with each other. The government consisted of Czechs and Slovaks, movies were filmed in the Prague studio with Czech actors or the Bratislava studio with Slovak actors, news was read in either language. One of the most popular sports commentators was from Slovakia and the best band of my teenage years was Elán, also from Slovakia (still going strong by the way). We all watched the films, listened to the news and sang along to the songs, not giving a second thought to the language in which they were presented. No one cared and everyone understood.
On January 1, 1993, the Czechoslovak federation split into two independent countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Czechs and Slovaks who had lived together in one country for almost three quarters of a century suddenly became two separate nations with their own capital cities, flags, presidents, and languages. Right after the split, the Slovak language virtually disappeared from the lives of the majority of Czechs.
To me, Slovak is so insanely similar to Czech and is so ingrained in my brain that I don’t even consider it a foreign language. Slovak is much more understandable to me than the Czech dialect spoken in Brno or Silesia. When asked by foreigners if Czechs and Slovaks understand each other, I have always said, “Well, of course!”. But now I’m not so sure…
Someone recently told me that Czech children supposedly don’t understand Slovak because they have no exposure to the language. I couldn’t believe it and argued passionately with the author of the preposterous statement. Then I read that a Slovak film had been dubbed into Czech before it was shown on Czech TV. I have also heard something to the effect that Czech children’s movies are not allowed to be shown on Slovak TV (in Czech I presume) because Slovak children wouldn’t understand them. What is going on?
Is it even possible for Czechs and Slovaks to not understand each other? I have thought about this long and hard. My initial reaction is a big and bold NO. The vocabularies of both languages contain a large percentage of words that are identical or differ only slightly (e.g. který - ktorý, velmi - veľmi, mléko - mlieko). On the other hand however, there are words that look and sound completely different. I wonder if there are just enough of them to hinder understanding between today’s kids and teenagers who aren’t growing up hearing those words and who are completely out of touch with the language that once came as a second nature to us.
It has been thirteen years since Czechoslovakia split up. Is it possible that we were able to “lose a language” in such a short time?
